Atmospheric impacts, fragmentation, and small craters on Venus

Details Atmospheric impacts, fragmentation, and small craters on Venus Atmospheric impacts, fragmentation, and small craters on Venus

Jun 2004

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2004icar..169..287k&link_type=abstract

Icarus, Volume 169, Issue 2, p. 287-299.

Physics

6

Impacts, Craters, Venus

Scientific paper

We use high-resolution three-dimensional numerical models of aerodynamically disrupted asteroids to predict the characteristic properties of small impact craters on Venus. We map the mass and kinetic energy of the impactor passing though a plane near the surface for each simulation, and find that the typical result is that mass and energy sort themselves into one to several strongly peaked regions, which we interpret as more-or-less discrete fragments. The fragments are sufficiently well separated as to imply the formation of irregular or multiple craters that are quite similar to those found on Venus. We estimate the diameters of the resulting craters using a scaling law derived from the experiments of Schultz and Gault (1985, J. Geophys. Res. 90 (B5), 3701-3732) of dispersed impactors into targets. We compare the spacings and sizes of our estimated craters with measured diameters tabulated in a Venus crater database (Herrick and Phillips, 1994a, Icarus 111, 387-416 Herrick et al., 1997, in: Venus II, Univ. of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ, pp. 1015-1046 Herrick, 2003, http://www.lpi.usra.edu/research/vc/vchome.html) and find quite satisfactory agreement, despite the uncertainty in our crater diameter estimates. The comparison of the observed crater characteristics with the numerical results is an after-the-fact test of our model, namely the fluid-dynamical treatment of large impacts, which the model appears to pass successfully.

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